Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday March 07, 2011 @01:23PM
from the there-will-be-many-more dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 4 vs. IE9 is going to be an epic battle in a reigniting browser war in which Microsoft wants its IE to be seen as a capable browser again. Mozilla struggled to keep the pace with Chrome and IE9, but is about to release the first release candidate, which is expected to be the final version of Firefox 4 as well. This first review of JavaScript, Flash and HTML5 tests seems to indicate that both browsers are about even at the bottom line, while Firefox has the JavaScript edge and IE is ahead in HTML5 performance."

Unfortunately, Beta 12 introduced a crazy printing glitch on my local setup, so I hope by the RC they put enough stuff in order to make it go away again. I rolled back to Beta 11 and sent them a Feedback.

How else do you expect interns to print a copy of the internet for our Congressmen? Surely you don't expect them to master those newfangled computer things AND those pellytone contraptions all at the same time!

Actually, I'm not. The more the browser makers fight over each % in market share, the better off we all are. I'd rather have 4 or 5 browsers continuously fighting it out than the situation we had back in 2001.

I'm also glad to see that IE is competitive again. It's not that I want it to dominate every again but I am so sick and tired of feeling like emerging web technologies are held hostage by Microsoft's unwillingness (it's clearly not inability as IE9 is demonstrating) to build a browser that doesn't swallow testicles.

Don't forget the countless people on older Windows software that won't be supported. MS fanboys claim that this because IE9 needs the unique features of late Windows versions, despite Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari having the same features and can run on older OS'es some can even run on Linux.

What does that say about MS? Either they are not as capable as their competitors or not as willing.

Make no mistake. MS has NOT changed its attitude. It will simply do IE9 hoping it can dominate again, then ignore it

The thing is, the other browsers do NOT have the "same features" when running on XP.

For example, Firefox only does 2d hardware acceleration on Windows at the moment, and only on Vista/Win7. It does 3d hardware acceleration everywhere, though.

Now I think the MS decision is not the right one, but is it qualitatively different from Mozilla not shipping a Firefox 4 on PPC due to the lack of a JIT backend for that architecture and hence not being able to deliver equivalent JS performance?

I'm also glad to see that IE is competitive again. It's not that I want it to dominate every again but I am so sick and tired of feeling like emerging web technologies are held hostage by Microsoft's unwillingness (it's clearly not inability as IE9 is demonstrating) to build a browser that doesn't swallow testicles.

Competitive does not equal "Faster than Firefox, but slower than Chrome...: at least not in my mind. While speed increases play some part in the competitive nature of their offering, there are other things, such as... oh, I dunno... adherence to web standards, security, a plug-in mechanism that actually allows uninstalling unwanted plugins and extensions (as opposed to simply being able to semi-disable them), functionality, ease of use. unambiguous text indicating that numerous of the setup options (and the

I agree they are only worth posting when there is a significant win one either side. Right now it looks like IE9 has a slight lead in some areas over Firefox. Which means nothing. Other then IE has gotten the Most Improved Award. Just as long as we have competing browsers that have a fair market share (EI, FireFox, Chrome and Safari) I am happy once either side gets a good win (Like IE 5-6 did) then that is where the trouble gets in where the winner separates from the standard and forces its own standard

So circa 2004 when Firefox first emerged from the hollowed out husk of Netscape was the bronze age of browsers, then? Wake me up when we make it to the platinum age and Microsoft stops relying on security-through-obscurity and adds better support for Non-windows platforms...

In all seriousness, though, I'm glad Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla (and Opera) are all making improvements to the state-of-the-art.

Good post, and I agree. It now comes down to requested features. In my case, extensions are a great thing. AdBlock Pro, No Scipt, Tab Mix Plus, and Slimsearch are all great extensions that are a must have. Others may have differing views / needs.

once either side gets a good win (Like IE 5-6 did) then that is where the trouble gets in where the winner separates from the standard and forces its own standards.

Then I'd be most worried about Chrome. IE can only affect the Windows market, which is not even assured will be relevant in the not-so-distant future. Mozilla has a history of open processes and backward compatibility, for instance there was huge debate and rationale before switching to the awesome bar and you can make it 'less awesome' if you want to. Chrome on the other hand is already including custom junk like native client, SPDY (which is a crappy protocol btw), and like gnome they change the UI on

You forgot one thing, many many people are starting to use mobile devices more and more to surf the web. Mozilla latest beta of Mobile Firefox is supposedly the fastest browser for mobile devices.

Having more competition in the mobile space is also a good thing because it allows webdevelopers to create websites which can take advantage of the new HTML5-API's for offline use. HTML5 is not only a new version of HTML but was specifically created to allow developers to easily create applications for the web (so

Which means nothing. Other then IE has gotten the Most Improved Award.

Which also means nothing. Considering where they came from, (and numerous broken compatibility and speed promises), it's really not too hard for them to earn such an award. It's actually more shocking that it took them this long.

Just as long as we have competing browsers that have a fair market share (EI, FireFox, Chrome and Safari) I am happy once either side gets a good win (Like IE 5-6 did)

Yes... but the playing field is a lot different now. Microsoft no longer has the leverage to ensure the clear win they had back with IE6, or the decent win with IE5. It's not like Netscape wasn't faster - and heck, even better - back then. This time around, it will be based on the

It's a little like that. Right now most of the fighting is between Javascript and rendering speed. Javascript performance is definitely no longer a bottleneck, a lot of work has been done there by a lot of people and all of the current browsers are orders of magnitude faster than browsers 5 years ago. Rendering speed is still an issue though, it doesn't do any good if I can manipulate the entire DOM in milliseconds if it takes the browser several seconds to render what I did.

But don't worry, even if it's boring for you the end result is better browsers all around.

I still perceive difference between running Google docs in Chrome vs running it in Firefox 4 b13pre (it is noticeably slower in the later).

Does "slower" indicate that Javascript performance is worse, or that rendering speed is worse? Firefox lags quite a bit at rendering speed (especially with Firebug running), I can notice that in my own applications. It will execute the code quickly, but it takes its time to update the display. It sounds like you're seeing an issue with page rendering speed, not Javascript execution speed.

It's about open standards. The reason we root for firefox is because Mozilla's goal is not to dominate the web, but to push open standards that can be used by everybody (including Microsoft).

Microsoft's goal, obviously, is purely to dominate. The only reason we see them adopting web standards now is because IE's market share has dropped like a rock over the past 5 years. They have no choice, and we can thank Firefox for that.

Or even compatibility reasons. And I'm definitely not an MS hater. I use it because of the well implemented and widely used plugin system. IE has something similar but it's just not as well done and doesn't have as rich an ecosystem. So I don't really care about a 10% difference here, or an 8.5% difference there that I will never notice anyway.

Agreed. At this point, I'm willing to accept rendering quirks to have the plugins I rely on.

Nothing has helped more than NoScript & AdBlock to skip the HTTP requests for junk at sites I visit often. When I try enabling them, there is a noticeable lag in page completion. Chrome and IE do not block those requests, but can skip the render, last time I checked.

I'm almost happier that IE holds a share of the browser market, it lets web publishers still think their ads are working for them. If everyone used

Right this second, likely IE. There was a last-minute security fix that introduced some undesirable lag into drawImage in Firefox and makes the fishtank a bit slower. Making it faster again isn't going to make Firefox 4, but will make Firefox 5 in a few months.

IE is ahead in security(say what you like but vulns are at parity, and IE has support for sandboxing and WIC which FF lacks) and resource usage.

FF wins for flexibility, configurability and extensibility, the things that matter to most people on this site.

Things like speed and standards compliance are becoming irrelevant, as all 4 modern browsers are more than good enough. It's things like interface and how you can extend and configure the browser. In this Chrome is last, then IE, the Opera with Firefox coming in first, which is why it will be in the lead for a while.

The Flash text benchmark is highly suspicious. IE9 posts by far the worst score for that benchmark on one machine, then beats FF on the same test on another machine. Without any description of testing methodology, I can only assume the benchmarking procedure is totally broken (e.g. maybe they only ran each one once) and so the results are best taken with a pinch of salt, even if they're not entirely useless.

Microsoft always cares about being number 1 in everything. Sometimes they stick their noses where it doesn't belong. They can't accept to lose in something. Yet if they really cared they would put more thought into their products before they released them and focus more on fixes rather than trying to constantly come out with a product to trump someone else.

Not sure how trying to build a better product in an area MS has had enormous success in constitutes sticking "their noses where it doesn't belong". Besides, the existence of MS's shitty browser (along with the shittiness of our old friend Netscape) was one of the catalysts for the development of Firefox in the first place. Competition is a good thing.

I don't know how IE has an HTML5 advantage since they have to do a WebGL conversion to DirectX which causes all renders to take 3X as long. You can hear it talked about in this demo from Fractallab(http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/07/tom-subblue-reddard.html#comments) an online fractal generator built in HTML5 using WebGL.

Well you got me on a technicality; it's supported through the canvas tag (part of the HTML5 spec) and WebGL is an open standard with it's own spec and is supported by all browsers... except IE. Making it the lone hold out and a throwback. This is SVG and CSS all over again. Where other browsers advance, IE stands back and waits and as a result, gets lapped by progress.

So those who use HTML5 and want 3D applications will just all be converting to Chrome, Safari or Firefox as a result. No harm done.

The people that actually care about this have either made the switch already or have stuck with IE through it all, for whatever reason. Most of the end users I deal with that are on IE either don't have a clear concept of what a browser even is, or basically state they hate change and they've always used IE because "it's good enough" (likely because of all the IE workarounds we web developers have been forced to employ).

Don't get me wrong - from a web development standpoint I'm ecstatic Microsoft is trying hard to improve IE's standards support and functionality. But I just don't believe IE 9's performance is going to make a significant impact on people's perceptions of it.

IE till lags Firefox and Chrome in some of the larger "real world" benchmarks, but compared with prior iterations of IE, the improvements to V9 are nothing short of stunning. Similarly Firefox 4 Beta 12 cooks over 3.6.15 -- but even 3.6.15 has improved dramatically over prior 3.6 versions. The big stunner for me is how close all of the browsers are becoming in performance, while taking slightly different directions in browser tabs, menus, etc. -- but that most of the "nasty trick tests" I know for XHTML and CSS through what we sorta call "2.1" don't fail in any of the new browsers. (I've been stuck in VB land for the last year, so I can't claim enough knowledge to test either HTML5 or the CSS 3.X stuff at this point).

Anyway, what that means for me as a professional coder is that now I can concentrate on cross-PLATFORM applications, instead of cross-BROWSER. Which is nothing short of the best news I've had this year in terms of IT work.

IMO, the important part is that it actually conforms to those standards it claims it does - unlike the previous versions, where you had to use various hacks to do "conditional interpretation" of HTML & CSS because the same feature would be interpreted differently by IE compared to other browsers. With this release, there is a decent subset of HTML5 that you know you can code against, and have it render/work correctly in IE and everywhere else.

Probably what you want is for firefox to scale only its UI elements.. and it can... it just doesnt do it based on an OS setting that doesnt have a clearly defined meaning (ie, should the displayed document also be scaled, or just the applications UI elements? Maybe text in the document, but not margins?).. remember that your DPI setting in all probability doesnt actually describe your monitors physical DPI.

Windows has had a very well-defined meaning for DPI, and has done since XP. EVERYTHING is supposed to scale with the DPI setting. Everything does scale in most Microsoft applications. Yes, that includes documents and margins and UI elements.

If you want the UI elements to be larger but not the body, then you've ALWAYS done it by setting larger sizes for UI elements in the DisplayProperties control panel. Not by setting DPI.

There is no "DPI aware problem", apart from the UI programmers you mention -- and they're just being ignorant or lazy.

So you pit the two browsers currently losing market share against each other? Granted IE far more than Firefox, but the standard to beat right now is Chrome. Look at the graph [statcounter.com]. There's only browser going up is Chrome. Maybe IE9 and FF4 can stop their customers bleeding away, but they have a long road to get on the offensive - particularly IE.

No, they pit the two browsers currently comprising 75% of the market - because when one publishes a report on performance one doesn't include fanboi rants about trends. Chrome will indeed get included on many comparisons, but TFA made clear that they are just comparing two emerging versions of largest segments.

Firefox 4 could possibly stop the market share bleeding, but it does not have the unique feature set and appeal to win users back from Chrome

Strange conclusion, when they didn't compare the browser to Chrome in the article, but IE 9. I'm not showing a preference for either of these browsers involved - I just thought it was late in the article to start talking of a completely different web browser...

Both browsers are fast JavaScript browsers and the differences are unlikely to be noticed in average browsing today.

Firefox 4 and IE9 are substantially upgraded browsers when compared to their predecessors and show few weaknesses in any benchmark.

It is obvious that Firefox has a great JavaScript engine.

IE9s hardware acceleration engine is the one to beat.

Firefox's only real competition is Chrome for the standpont of what the author calls and unexplained "unique feature set" which IE9 appears to lack altogether.

So it's a draw on performance. No evaluation was done from the very important security standpoint. The most striking difference not commented upon but highlighted by the results is the poor performance of the Intel graphics chipset in both browsers.

Firefox will continue to be standards compliant and MSIE will continue to be a standard complaint.

Microsoft has too much invested in its old tech and backward compatibility. Furthermore, it still has too much to gain from "everyone else's browsers seem broken while MSIE works just fine" which is still a pervasive perception among users.

(This has a chance to change, though, as MSIE9 will be clearly unavailable to WinXP users, web sites will begin updating to support MSIE9 leaving MSIE8 users less supported

QUOTE: "Ever wondered why Firefox is only just approaching version 4 after more than 6 years, when Chrome is up to version 9 in just over 2 years?"

No because I don't give a fuck about things that don't matter.

The new policy is pretty ridiculous when you think about it. Chrome and Firefox will be up to version 40-something by the end of the decade. IMHO it's more logical to avoid such large numbers by using decimal points. Release 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 this year, not 5, 6, 7.

IMHO it's more logical to avoid such large numbers by using decimal points. Release 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 this year, not 5, 6, 7.

That's only a clear win if there's some notion of compatibility (either programmatic or user experience) that you're maintaining among the 4.x releases, and even then it may not be. E.g. I find the progression of Linux kernel versions to be increasingly ridiculous; I'd rather see "the current stable release is 37.2 and the current unstable release is 38-rc7" than "the current stable relea

Thats about the philosophy that Emacs adopted. The current version in development, 23.3, would have been 1.23.3 under the original numbering scheme. But then they realized they were probably never going to bump the major version again and so they might as well drop it. Makes a lot of sense to me, honestly.

Ah, but the "big number" thing doesn't roll around, 9 sounds more than 11. The 6990 is a much faster and higher model than the 7230. Every time you get there, you like to reset your number scheme somehow, like for example OS X. Could they have continued with 11, 12, 13 etc? Yes, but it doesn't sound that good. Instead they just "froze" the version and technically haven't had a major version upgrade in 9 years. I'm sure you all realize that is bullshit though, that "10.6" is actually OS XVI. I wager that pre

No it just depends on what you expect from your release. Providing the feature upgrades are consistent I see no reason why going with your approach we won't end up with version 4.20 by the end of the decade. The only difference is if you take this approach eventually someone is going to expect that you will release a version 5 that is somehow the second coming of Christ.

You can always go down the AutoCAD or MS Office route and start naming your release by the year.

Maybe it's been edited since you saw it, but right now it says "which is expected to be the final version of Firefox 4 as well." I agree that it's pretty poorly worded, but it should be obvious enough that it means that the release candidate will become the 4.0 release (i.e. they aren't planning another release candidate).

Actually, I recently switched from Chrome back to Firefox around 4b9, and Firefox performs _MUCH_ better, especially (for some strange reason) with Flash content. Running Flash on Chrome used to make my entire system slow to a crawl.

I've been switching back to Firefox for my primary since I can't seem to run Chrome on my other monitor in Win7 while also running a "fullscreen windowed" game at the same time without the whole machine completely locking up.

About the only one I really needed was firebug, and that comes builtin for chrome, and stuff like adblock etc. there's plenty going around for chrome, even the web-developer toolbar has been ported (not that I need that much).

Sunspider is a redundant test -- as are Kraken, V8, and the rest of them. Synthetic benchmarks are inherently flawed and we should all pay far less attention to them, but they happen to be easy to convey and chart (much like flawed compliance "tests" like Acid3 and html5test).

That said, there was almost certainly no cheating. That was a valid optimization. What was identified was a boundary condition in the JIT, which took two syntactically identical statements, which were not lexically identical, and showed that only one was optimized out. People who don't have any idea how to make an optimizing compiler decided that the only way this could happen was cheating, leaving out mistakes or intentional heuristics.

The problem with that theory is that it would be more difficult to develop a cheating optimizing compiler with the characteristics it had, for that situation, than to actually come up with an optimization, so it's outright absurd. The guy who discovered the discrepancy never called it cheating.

The RC scores the same in those tests now. I bet it was something simple like doing a quick one-line dead code elimination pass before the full dead code elimination heuristics decided whether to bother trying.

Since you posted twice I know you're trolling, but I'll bite for anyone that doesn't know better. HTML 5 is in a draft state, much of it's functionality is still in flux with some parts being more stable than others. At this point we can't fault a vendor for not wanting to be stuck with an implementation that's broken later because they implemented an earlier draft.

I thought that IE 9, with its much-improved standards compliance, was also going to support MathML. After seeing your post I did a quick search and found that it turns out that IE 9 doesn't even allow good MathML support with the proprietary (but free) MathPlayer plugin. Since this is one of the few features I have a reason to care about, I'm quite disappointed.

Whoops, left out a delimiting quotation mark, should have previewed. Trying again:

I thought that IE 9, with its much-improved standards compliance, was also going to support MathML. After seeing your post I did a quick search and found that it turns out [dessci.com] that IE 9 doesn't even allow HTML5+MathML support with the proprietary (but free) MathPlayer plugin. Since this is one of the few features I have a reason to care about, I'm quite disappointed.